Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Daniel Larison vs. The Feaver Swamp

Larison, who is so reasonable it'll bring tears to your eyes, has a very nice refutation of a strange piece by Peter Feaver.

This is really important stuff to do. The strategies of the Iraq war apologists are evolving. If left unrefuted, in 20 years people who weren't alive at the time might no know what to think about what went down. It's very important to keep repeating the kinds of things Larison says here: e.g. that the problem wasn't so much outright lies as it was a concerted campaign of subtler deception that only occasionally descended into outright lies. Focus on the outright lies, and it's easy for the apologists to point out that those were relatively few and far between; and it's easy to end up on the wrong side of that exchange. It's crucial to be very clear about what the real problem was. The shorthand version is: Bush lied. The accurate version is more complicated than that.